Editing Radiosity (computer graphics) (section)

== Limitations ==
Typical radiosity methods only account for light paths of the form LD*E, i.e. paths which start at a light source and make multiple diffuse bounces before reaching the eye.  Although there are several approaches to integrating other illumination effects such as [[Specular reflection|specular]]<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Wallace|first1=John R.|last2=Cohen|first2=Michael F.|last3=Greenberg|first3=Donald P.|title=A two-pass solution to the rendering equation: A synthesis of ray tracing and radiosity methods |journal=ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics |date=August 1987|volume=21|issue=4|pages=311–320|doi=10.1145/37402.37438|issn=0097-8930}}</ref> and glossy<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/labs/cglab/papers/clustering/|title=Clustering for glossy global illumination|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061012174121/http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/labs/cglab/papers/clustering/|archive-date=2006-10-12|access-date=2006-12-29}}</ref> reflections, radiosity-based methods are generally not used to solve the complete rendering equation.

Basic radiosity also has trouble resolving sudden changes in visibility (e.g. hard-edged shadows) because coarse, regular discretization into piecewise constant elements corresponds to a [[low-pass filter|low-pass box filter]] of the spatial domain.  Discontinuity meshing [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/discon.ps.gz] uses knowledge of visibility events to generate a more intelligent discretization.